Lieberman Website Hacked by His Own Bungling Staff

If the definition of “hacker” is a three-term senator whose staff doesn’t have enough technical smarts to realize that an uber-cheap, sub-$30/month $150/month web hosting company might NOT be the best choice when you’re running for your life in the Democratic Primary in Connecticut, then Joe Lieberman’s campaign website got hacked.

But despite many news reports and comments from Lieberman’s staff, Joe2006.com was not overrun by hackers. It was simply overrun by popularity. It seems pretty clear that Lieberman’s campaign chose to host his mission-critical website on a very shaky platform. DailyKos has confirmed that Lieberman’s campaign website was running on a Windows shared server with over 70 other companies’ websites, including one that sells guitars (check out the secured version of https://joe2006.com/).

Dan Gerstein, of Lieberman’s campaign, originally claimed that supporters of Ned Lamont hacked the site but now fesses up that he doesn’t actually have any evidence to support his original claim.

By my estimate, the situation is that Lieberman’s campaign purchased hosting from a website reseller (MyHostCamp.com, which is hosted by theplanet.com) at a very low rate per month, perhaps even with “unlimited” bandwidth. Then when Lieberman’s race for the Senate made front page news all over the US, MyHostCamp.com ran out of bandwidth from their provider or shut joe2006.com down for using too much. Either way, Lieberman has made a tragic mistake in managing his campaign and given that he’s likely to lose the primary tonight, it just may be one of his last. [via KOS and TPMmuckraker]